The Greystone Chronicles: Book One: Io Online was an absolute blast and a wonderful start to a new LitRPG series. New to me anyway. And I enjoyed every minute of it despite its flaws. Flaws? Yes, but I’ll get to that in a moment. As I mentioned TGC: B1: IO (it’s a mouthful I know, lol) is the first book in a LitRPG, and it hits almost all the typical tropes you’d expect from the genre. Many, though certainly not all LitRPGs, tend to feature dual storylines. One dealing with the full immersion world that has our heroes questing and leveling up, and we’ll also have the real world where typically we see at least one or more of those same heroes deal with real world issues, often dealing with matters or life and death. Greystone Chronicles does indeed feature events in both world, and sadly there are flaws to the story in both the online and the real world sections of the story.
The problem with the real world issues is that they aren’t really followed up on. Alexander, our main character, has a serious neurological disease and his immersion in the virtual world is supposedly going to help ‘cure’ him. There is plenty of time spent setting part of the story up, and I must say I found it fairly interesting. And yet by the end of the book we have no clue whether or not this ‘therapy’ is working. A completely different real world issue pops up. That issue is also interesting, but it almost feels like the original issue had been completely forgotten about, which is a shame. I do realize this is only the first book in the series, but I would have thought given the amount of time devoted to the discussing Alexander’s condition, something would have been said about initial results of the therapy.
Now that’s the flaw in the real world part of the book. The online section of the book suffers from two flaws IMO. Flaw #1 is that the characters are totally OP. After becoming fully immersed in the world they are started back at level 1, and yet they are almost instantly kicking insane amounts of high level butt. They develop unheard of skills and seem to master these new abilities instantly, easily taking out monsters and characters at insanely high levels. Toward the end Alexander basically singlehandedly destroys a level 80 character while he’s still around mid-20s. I still enjoyed the heck out it, and if I were playing such a game I would love being as OP as the characters are. Flaw #2, IMO kind of goes hand in hand with flaw #1. I never felt as if the heroes were in any danger. And this goes beyond them just being OP, I simply mean there never felt like there would be consequences if they died in the game. Sure they’d lose a bit of experience, but there were no real consequences for failure.
Now that being said, the story was insanely enjoyable. I liked the characters and loved the humor. I appreciated how good natured Alexander is and his desire to make the kingdom a better place and to protect the citizens of the realm even if they were only NPCs and the he engages in with the player killers is great fun. I will say, however, that the author makes some odd choices. He’s written long stretches where he describes build stuff, everything from a forge, to rebuilding multiple buildings in a town. Now if I was reading this I don’t know that I wouldn’t have just skipped ahead. There is nothing particularly wrong with these parts. It’s just that describing every facet of crafting a house, even down to the plumbing, is really necessary to the story, never mind repeating that process by describing the crafting of a church, a barracks, an inn…..you get the point. Now as I said, if I had been reading it myself I might have skipped it, but I had no desire to that here mainly due the fantastic job of narration…which I shall hit upon next.
This book was narrated by Laurie Catherine Winkel and Jeff Hays. Well that is to say Laurie narrated and Jeff help by supplying the male voices. I don’t really need talk about Jeff, do I? If you don’t know how I feel about Jeff’s work then check out some of my other reviews. When it comes to vocal work, Jeff Hays is a Swiss army knife! Seriously, the guy comes up with a unique voice and speech pattern for every character he voices in a book. So I don’t really feel the need to harp on his talent. Now Laurie is someone who I don’t believe I’ve ever heard before, but that is going to change. She was fantastic! Seriously. I mentioned how the author had an odd habit of detailed descriptions of how things got built…well that didn’t bother me at all because I enjoyed listening to Laurie so much. Without question I’ll be checking out more of her work in the future, and definitely hope she and Jeff are back for the next book in the series because they were a fantastic team. You can seriously never go wrong with a Soundbooth Theater production.
Bottom line: I enjoyed the heck of the story and absolutely loved the narration. The only question I have is when will book 2’s audio be out?
I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review